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Real Love: The Love We’ve All Been Looking For — Unconditional Love

We've heard songs about it, seen it in the movies, heard it talked about on Oprah by relationship experts, and read about it in thousands of self help books. But, what is unconditional love? We all want to feel loved. We think about it, hope for it, fantasize about it, go to great lengths to achieve it, and feel that our lives are incomplete without it. The lack of unconditional love is the cause of most of our anger and confusion. It is no exaggeration to say that our emotional need for unconditional love is just as great as our physical need for air and food.

It is especially unfortunate, then, that most of us have no idea what unconditional love really is, and we prove our ignorance with our horrifying divorce rate, the incidence of alcohol and drug addiction in our country, the violence in our schools, and our overflowing jails.

Our misconceptions of unconditional love began in early childhood, where we saw that when we did all the right things—when we were clean, quiet, obedient and otherwise “good”—eople “loved” us. They smiled at us and spoke in gentle tones. But we also saw that when we were “bad,” all those signs of “love” instantly vanished. In short, we were taught by consistent experience that love was conditional, that we had to buy “love” from the people around us with our words and behavior.

So what’s wrong with conditional love? We see it everywhere we look, so what could be wrong with it? Imagine that every time you pay me fifty dollars, I tell you I love you. We could do that all day, but at the end of the day would you feel loved? No, because you’d know that I “loved” you only because you paid me. We simply can’t feel fulfilled by love we pay for. We can feel loved only when it is freely, unconditionally given to us. The instant we do anything at all to win the approval or respect of other people—with what we say, what we do, how we look—we are paying for the attention and affection we receive, and we can’t feel genuinely loved.

A New Definition of Love: Real Love

There’s only one kind of love that can fill us up, make us whole, and give us the happiness we all want: unconditional love or true love. It is unconditional love that we all seek, and somehow we intuitively realize that anything other than that kind of love isn’t really love at all—it’s an imitation of the real thing.

Unconditional love—true love—is so different from the kind of love most of us have known all our lives that it deserves both a name—Real Love—and definition of its own: Real Love is caring about the happiness of another person without any thought for what we might get for ourselves. It’s also Real Love when other people care about our happiness unconditionally. It is not Real Love when other people like us for doing what they want. Under those conditions we’re just paying for love again. We can be certain that we’re receiving Real Love only when we make foolish mistakes, when we fail to do what other people want, and even when we get in their way, but they don’t feel disappointed or irritated at us. That is Real Love (true unconditional love), and that love alone has the power to heal all wounds, bind people together, and create relationships quite beyond our present capacity to imagine.

What we Do Without Real Love: Imitation Love

If we don’t have enough Real Love in our lives, the resulting emptiness is unbearable. We then compulsively try to fill our emptiness with whatever feels good in the moment—money, anger, sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, power, and the conditional approval of others. Anything we use as a substitute for Real Love becomes a form of Imitation Love, and although Imitation Love feels good for a moment, it never lasts and never gives us the feeling of genuine happiness that Real Love provides.
Most people spend their entire lives trying to fill their emptiness with Imitation Love, but all they achieve is an ever-deepening frustration, punctuated by brief moments of superficial satisfaction. All the unhappiness in our lives is due to that lack of Real Love and to the frustration we experience as we desperately and hopelessly try to create happiness from a flawed foundation of Imitation Love. The beauty of Real Love is that it ALWAYS will eliminate our anger, confusion, and pain. So how do we find this universal cure?

“The simplest form of awakening to god is…. A new intense sense of self, accompanied with a desire. With the feeling of being a destiny. This condition… cannot be induced. It simply happens. But from time immemorial, in different cultures and religious climates, people have used a method for quieting or simplifying consciousness so that a person may be better disposed for the moment of awakening”
“This new moment, of self-acceptance in a love relationship is a crucial moment. It is the watershed of all human relationships. It is what most of us most of the time stop short of. For this is the vital point at which our belief in our goodness is not strong enough to carry us forward. It is always some, often subtle, self—rejection that hinders us from believing in another’s finding us attractive and from seeing that the other does so when this happens…. And thus our weak sense of goodness holds us short of interdependent relationships, and keeps us in dependent relationships. We are willing slaves to beauty rather than shares in beauty”

Pinguino
Do you think Dave cares that I post here?

He doesn't seem to .

He loves his exes still caring.
He let Marguax all into our relationship.
He needs can out.

Signs and Characteristics of Love Addiction:

* Lack of nurturing and attention when young
* Feeling isolated, detached from parents and family
* Compartmentalization of relationships from other areas of life
* Outer facade of "having it all together" to hide internal disintegration
* Mistake intensity for intimacy (drama driven relationships)
* Hidden Pain
* Seek to avoid rejection and abandonment at any cost
* Afraid to trust anyone in a relationship
* Inner rage over lack of nurturing, early abandonment
* Depressed
* Highly manipulative and controlling of others
* Perceive attraction, attachment, and sex as basic human needs, on a par with food and water
* Sense of worthlessness without a relationship or partner
* Feelings that a relationship makes one whole, or more of a man or woman
* Escalating tolerance for high-risk behavior
* Intense need to control self, others, circumstances
* Presence of other addictive or compulsive problems
* Insatiable appetite in area of difficulty (sex, love or attachment / need.)
* Using others, sex & relationships to alter mood or relieve emotional pain
* Continual questioning of values and lifestyle
* Driven, desperate, frantic personality
* Confusion of sexual attraction with love ("Love" at first sight.)
* Tendency to trade sexual activity for "love" or attachment
* Existence of a secret "double life"
* Refusal to acknowledge existence of problem
* Defining out-of-control behavior as normal
* Defining "wants" as "needs"
* Tendency to leave one relationship for another. (Inability to be without a relationship.)
* Attempts to replace lost relationships with a new one immediately

Dave, you must have read this, it's so you.

How to avoid responsibility.
( your mom, and Pinguino will be so proud)

1.Believe your own hype. You have to believe that you are as good and as wonderful as people say you are. This has nothing to do with self-confidence and everything to do with the need for external validation. You must be told that you are great, otherwise what’s the point? Grown-ups know that they are not always great, and you are trying to avoid getting to this point.
Step2
Surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear. Who wants to be told anything that is contrary to your perceived greatness? Sycophants, brown-nosers, and suck-ups are ideal to keep around you, so that your ego can be constantly inflated and you can remain in ignorant bliss of your shortcoming
Step3
Ignore any advice that leads to personal growth and self-revelation. It is often said that growing older is mandatory while growing up is optional. Growing up means that you actually face the not-so-great parts about ourselves and owning up to how we have contributed to most of the messes we’ve made in our lives. Where’s the fun in that?
Step4
Keep your baggage packed. We all have baggage that we have accumulated during our stay on this earth. Most have outlived their usefulness, yet we still tote them around. In order to continue to avoid being a grown-up, it is important to not unpack that baggage and sort out the useful from the destructive. You must keep it packed and stored in a dark, remote corner (preferably where you can’t readily see it) and tote it around like a pack mule into each and every relationship and situation you encounter.
( I always said you came with a suitcase into our relationship, And Margaux isn't light, you must be pretty wieghted by now)
Step5
Stay within your comfort zone. Change for the better occurs when one sails away from safe harbors and into unchartered waters. But then you’d have to be accountable for the lessons you learn and for finding undiscovered parts about yourself (and maybe some rediscovered parts), and that could lead to personal growth and (there’s that word again) responsibility. So keep creating situations where you are in control, you can stay distant, you can not be engaged, and you can put barriers between yourself and what you really want.
( keep going out every night, drinking, that way you won't ever have to connect or ever know the people in your life, it's working so far.)

Optimism-
The opinion or doctrine that everything in nature, being the work of God, is ordered for the best, or that the ordering of things in the universe is such as to produce the highest good.

that's me

Optimism-
The opinion or doctrine that everything in nature, being the work of God, is ordered for the best, or that the ordering of things in the universe is such as to produce the highest good.

that's me